Mar 20 Mallinsons Calypso Cask

My first pint at the Euston tap. My wife and our friends went to the Tower of London on our last day in London, but I decided to find this famed gatehouse turned tap house instead. Apologies to the Crown Jewels but I bet the haven't moved much since the last time I was there.

This is amazingly my first opportunity to get a cask ale while in London, so combined with the fact I was going to be sitting for a few hours I thought it appropriate to start light. I've tried a few calypso beers in the past, and found the hop to bring a great bit of unique flavor. My pint pours a clear dark yellow with a standard almost nonexistent cask beer head. Smells lack luster and malty. One of my serious gripes with cask, and I am going to air a few of them so if you are a cask freak you might want to avert your eyes, is the lack of smell. Smooth low carbonated beer doesn't have that cascading head and rising carbonation that carries big hoppy notes out of the glass and into your sniffer. That's very evident here as this doesn't smell any different from any other cask ale I have had, even with the addition of a fairly new and fairly pungent American hop. The taste is smooth as silk until you hit the bitterness of the hopping. There is no carbonation to hide the bitterness of the beer and that really mucks it up for me. The calypso is basically nowhere to be found with only an earthy bitter flavor of hops with a tang of English malt. If you gave this to me I would be hard pressed to tells you it was anything but a normal fuggles/EKG/Bramling bitter poured at anypub.co.uk. Therefore you get a low six for a beer I bought on a craft promise and got nothing but a bad taste in my mouth.